Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

I raised my concerns with him tactfully. Could he really afford the little wax-paper packets of nuts he was required to bring her every other day, as if she were a squirrel? Wasn’t it possible that she was using him? Couldn’t he see that they had different standards of behaviour, different systems of pronunciation, different grazing habits? (I never said a word about her colour.)

But none of it did any good. He was blind to her flaws, and my observations merely annoyed him. I knew from experience how an error that was glaringly obvious to everyone else could continue to evade the best of proofreaders. He would look past it again and again.

Spilkin and I ended up shouting at one another more than once, thanks to her sheer stupidity. Memorably when she tore half my crossword out of the newspaper on the back of a recipe for pickled fish. It reminded me, ironically, of something Spilkin used to say when we still saw eye to eye: ‘There was always a crossword between us, Tearle, but never a cross word.’

Spilkin across and Darlene down. Darlene across and Spilkin down? I still haven’t found the words.

*

Our Eveready was a waiter of the old school, trained in the beachfront hotels of Durban by a Hindu master. In his spare time, he had a church of his own, with headquarters at his kraal in Zululand, and he was the archbishop. He did not like bacon, although he would serve it up grudgingly. But he resolutely refused to tender alcohol. It was against the commandments of his church, which he himself had brought down from the top of a mine-dump on the East Rand. Seeing that the sale of alcoholic beverages made up a growing proportion of the Café’s earnings, it was not long before Eveready’s conscientious abstention proved inconvenient to Mrs Mavrokordatos.

Then there was a raid by the Hillbrow police, all the bottles on the premises were confiscated, and Eveready abruptly left Mrs Mavrokordatos’s employ. She said he had taken early retirement. But Wessels, who witnessed the sorry scene, said the poor fellow had been dismissed, protesting his innocence to the last, on suspicion of having tipped off the police about our proprietress’s liquor sales. After that, some of the policemen who had conducted the raid would pop in occasionally, and chat with Mrs Mavrokordatos in a corner, or drop a few coins in the fruit machines. Wessels recognized some of them from his days on the force, but did not let on because they were working undercover. Quote unquote.

Eveready’s replacement was a native of Soweto. Name of Vest. Waistcoat, I dubbed him. He had none of his predecessor’s antipathy to alcohol. The more people drank, he told me, the more likely they were to make mistakes with their money or drop their change. He was a bad apple all right. Standards of service went into immediate decline. The waiters were always searching under the tables for some drunkard’s pennies — when they weren’t watching television, that is.

The standards plumbed new depths (long since superseded) on the day Nelson ‘The Madiba’ Mandela was released from prison. You couldn’t get a pot of tea for love or money, because the waiters would not be dragged away from the screen. The kitchen staff, including several we had never seen before, trooped through in their aprons and shower-caps, and created quite a carnival atmosphere. The whole business went on for hours; it must have been four o’clock before he finally showed his face, and I had a feeling they’d been delaying deliberately, playing to the gallery. Now you see him, now you don’t. Some of the resident courtesans had been lifting their elbows all day, and when they finally clapped eyes on him, they began to weep, from sheer relief. Darlene, too. You never heard such a racket. Ululation and whatnot. Everyone wanted to get in on the act. Then they all stood to attention, waiters, cooks, bottle-washers, baggages, with their curled-up fists in the air, and sang the plaintive gobbledygook of their anthem. Vest had his pen in his fist and his order book under his arm. You could have waited till doomsday without attracting a waiter’s attention. In the end, Mrs Mavrokordatos had to fetch me a pot of tea herself, like a common serving girl. By which time I needed something stronger to steady my nerves.

*

First impressions? I was pleased to see that The Madiba was just another old party with spectacles, like myself, although he had rather more hair than was seemly. That aside, he was straight as a ruler, smart as a pin, not unreasonably black. The prison authorities had given him a finely tailored suit to step out in — but they might have spent the money more profitably on an eye test. Dip each frog, pour over the egg custard, and so on. He could hardly see with the spectacles he had, even after his wife had huffed on the lenses as if she meant to make a meal of them. They kept sliding down on his nose when he tried to read his speech.

‘Needs a new prescription,’ Spilkin said. ‘Myopic.’

I wrote a letter about it afterwards to the Star , starting with the etymology: from the Greek muops ( muo shut + ops eye). Shut-eye. Then a little joke about needing forty winks. Presented my credentials as something of an expert on eyewear. Thought of giving Spilkin a nod, decided against. Didn’t deserve it. Took the opportunity to comment on the lack of vision displayed by Mr Etcetera during his first speech to the masses. Behind my jocular tone was a serious point. The Madiba had been out of circulation, so to speak, for nearly thirty years. He could scarcely have a clear-sighted view of world affairs. How much more important, then, that further obstacles not be put in his way. Surely people realized that the lack of appropriate lenses might lead to serious errors of judgement; a single word misread — ‘suspicious’ for ‘auspicious’, say, or ‘congenital’ for ‘congenial’, or ‘treasonable’ for ‘reasonable’ — might plunge the country into crisis. As it was, there were several elementary grammatical errors in the speech (which I was pleased to correct for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers).

My letter came back unread: I could tell by the crispness of the folds in the paper that it had not received due consideration. That short-sighted letters editor had decided criticism was premature. It was the first sign that people like us would no longer have a say.

Why were standards falling fastest in those areas where examples should be set — in the public service, in the press, in broadcasting? It was thanks to shoddy pronunciation that I misapprehended The Madiba’s name. Spilkin had to set me right: not Conrad Mandela, but Comrade . And then he went and told the story to everyone who would listen. Darlene, who would have been well-advised to keep her trap shut, said it was amazing how the very people who thought they knew everything about the world knew nothing about their own country. ‘You whites,’ she said, and it struck me as odd, with Spilkin sitting there as large as life.

*

The most beautiful and mysterious of all the proofreader’s charms is the delete mark: .

Its origins are obscure. Debra Nitsch traces it back to the scribes and clerks, which is not inconceivable. But she is surely being whimsical when she sees in the mark the little gilded halo, complete with handle, found in engravings of medieval morality plays. And her story about the snuffer is pure conjecture.

Fleischer and Toyk are marginally better. Mervyn Toyk, as befits a son of the South-West, puts his money on the lasso. Helmut Fleischer sees half a percentage sign, and comments drily that it always summons up a missing something — ‘or rather a missing nothing’.